Monday, July 21, 2008

Someone mentioned in the comments last week that there was no way NBC would send all 106 commentators to Beijing for the Olympics and today the Chicago Tribune confirms that thought. NBC is choosing to cover ten events from their studios in New York rather then shipping a handful of play-by-play men and women over to China.....

The 10 events (out of 34) that NBC will cover remotely are archery, badminton, baseball, equestrian, fencing, handball, shooting, soccer, softball and tennis. Some basketball games also will be called off monitors in New York.

Walker said that NBC had done "a little bit" of remote event coverage for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin.

He said the network had not intended to announce its remote Beijing plan but also had not attempted to hide it from the public.

An official from a competing network called NBC's plan "stunning," although it is certainly not unprecedented.

I understand the costs associated with sending people overseas, but in this case what is 20-30 more people after you've already sent over 2,000 in total? It continues to bother me that stations decide to use this practice and especially at an event as crowd driven as the Olympics. Popular Olympic Sports like Soccer and Softball have passionate fans and taking that element away from the viewer seems unfair.

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Comments:

Soccer being called off of monitors is nothing new in the US. ESPN has been doing it for years with the Champions League and they did it this summer for Euro 2008. I'm fine with it as long as they acknowledge that they are not at the stadium.

The bigger travesty for Olympic soccer is that Marcelo Balboa is involved. Even ESPN realizes now that he sucks.

All of the former US players turned announcers are terrible. I'm an American and like seeing us do well, but their unbelievably strong pro-USA soccer attitude is extremely annoying. It's also sad because they try their hardest to make the viewers think that we're actually good, when hopefully the more experience soccer fan realized just how bad we really are on an international level and in our national league (MLS).

I have no problem wwith NBC not sending announcers to this events because no desrespect to fans of this particular sports Archary, shooting, badmeton, etc. Those sports don't bring that many viewers to the tube. And NBC not sending announcers to vover olympic baseball and softball should not be surprising because this is the last olympics for thsoe sports.

As I do not want to be a willing accomplice to China's propaganda-fest, I am planning on boycotting all Olympics coverage. (I will support the athletes but follow what they do via stories and highlights. Good luck to them all as they try to give their best while inhaling that brown sludge called Beijing's air.) Now that it seems NBC is spending more to promote their coverage than to actually bring us the thing, I have even less reason to watch. NBC should just advertise that they plan to bring us the best U.S.-biased coverage of the international pool feed. I will bet $1 million we never hear an announcer say "let's go to studio 6B at 30 Rock in New York for coverage of the baseball finals." They will use lies of omission to pretend the announcers are there.

Of course, like petulant children there will be grousing among those NBC-ers who get to go and those who don't. You can bet the ranch that those forced to 'stay behind' will find a way to air their laundry live.